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This 👇🏻
The most prolific thinkers aren’t thinking with external brains. If you’re a photographer, take more pictures. If you’re a writer, produce more text. The tools will work themselves out. Source: RIP: The External 🧠
I don’t really like the idea of a “second brain”. My brain, the only one that I got, already requires all my energy. Why bother creating another “brain”?
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On Articles Size & Twitter
Tweets on Twitter use to be 140 characters max. Later it was increased to 280 characters. Now, apparently, you can post a note with a maximum of 2500 characters.
Now, looking at MacRumors or similar sites, it seems we get shorter and shorter articles, almost the size of a note on Twitter. Isn’t it strange?
People are busy and their attention span has shrunk considerably. Twitter once was very popular and others tried to adjust to its modus operandi. The web is adjusting in unexpected ways.
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Feeling Helpless About Climate
Due to Canada’s forest fires and easterly winds, bad air quality is returning to my town for the next few days. With all the bad climate-related news coming up from everywhere on Earth, trying to understand what is happening is essential, so we can better adapt our lifestyle. I like to read many things on a subject that I find interesting, but climate change topic is utterly depressing. The planet is clearly slowly burning. All indicators are going in the wrong direction. How can we not feel helpless? It’s hard to stay informed and keep faith in humanity. Prove me wrong.
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We Must Do Something About Meta’s Monopoly
In my mind, every new platforms should start from 0 user base. Meta, just to name that one, have a monopoly of social graph. This is anti-competitive. Should Bluesky sue Meta? Should the open source community sue Meta? Yes. And yes.
Remember Microsoft and Internet Explorer back in the days? Remember Apple and the App Store?
We are not ready to accept this but here we are. Meta is a monopoly in my book. Time for regulation. I casted my vote: no Threads for me.
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Thought of the day: blog readers might not like negativity-tinted post or being told the truth they don’t want to read. I published my observations and opinion regarding our hyper-dependency on being connected all the time, so much that we don’t really connect in-person anymore. A few subscribers unsubscribed. 😒 Or maybe they just agree with my take and are looking for ways to regain more time in-person by unsubscribing from my blog? 😂
I guess there is always a positive side of an event. 🙏🏻
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Hunting vs ChatGPT
Hunters are not allowed to use drones to locate their prey. It is seen as an anti-competitive measure or an unfair practice. While “real” hunters who chase their future prey for fun aren’t allowed drone usage, what about those who hunt to eat meat because it is their way of living? Is it still forbidden?
Now, let’s do a parallel with LLM-derived tools like ChatGPT. Is it ok for fun but not ok for actual work? When are the lines crossed? Is the content the only determining factor?
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Thought of the moment: to those who think that AI will cause human extinction, we must fight against it, is the wrong way to tackle the debate. It is borderline demagoguery.
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Are We Ready for This Dystopian World?
Warning: it’s not about the Apple Vision Pro headset, which many people think will bring a touch of a dystopian future to our life. Something else more serious will.
I read this week somewhere that, to get climate back into the normality zone🌪️ to ensure the sustainability of the human race and life in general, everyone on earth would need to live in an oppressive world where everything would be controlled by laws and government all the time and for decades. From buying food to cars to travelling to entertainment services, we would be under constant quotas, which would bring our quality of life much lower than we currently enjoy. In fact, developed countries’ quality of life would join the much lower quality of life of the vast majority of the earth’s population in less developed countries. This would be the only way to get around this climate crisis. Not convinced? The COVID pandemic brought massive and repetitive confinements that weren’t enough to bend many climate change indicators downwards. It lasted two years, more or less. 😱
Oh, and should we talk about forced birth control everywhere? Because we should, even if this is a taboo subject.
Are we ready for this dystopian world? 😷
I can see a great Vision Pro use case right here where people watch daylong movies about what used to be a much more enjoyable world in 3D. 😒
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Here’s a short “life at the office” story. Our VP of sales never stops bragging about how ChatGPT is cool and how it works for him for many use cases. I’m uncomfortable with his stance on ChatGPT & generative AI in general. I think about it each time he sends an email that was obviously created with ChatGPT.
Why is it a problem for me? Who am I to judge him and his “new way of working”? I think I have found the root cause.
First, it’s not the results of his work. It’s the work of something else. He takes something “as is” without adding any value, any personal opinion, or a personal twist. Second, the fundamental problem is that he works in IT but is not a tech guy. He is a salesperson. He’s the type of guy who surfs on buzzwords a lot. Using ChatGPT makes him circumvent his lack of confidence because of a lack of IT knowledge and culture. He probably feels better and more “into the game” like most of my other colleagues, who studied computer science before getting to work in IT.
How many more people lack my colleague do the same, for the same reason?
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My Morning So Far
What an intense morning.
I learned about the existence of iTelescope, thanks to this blog post from Christopher Curtis, a service where you can rent astronomical observation time from the comfort of your home.
I read about the Eternal Recurrence, thanks to a post from Gr36. I would be ok with the idea of reliving my life as is. Over and over again.
Thanks to this superb article about Fediverse from Glenn Fleishman for Tidbits, I learned that we could follow anyone on Mastodon using an RSS feed, which we could do with Twitter. I’ll be able to re-add accounts to Inoreader to get news in one place, just as I was doing when I was on Twitter. Cool.
All this because I was searching for ideas to write a few linkposts. I wrote none except this post, but I learned quite a lot. I updated my Digital Garden accordingly.
As reported by Om Malik, automation is the next evolution step for fast food chains. Should I care?
Am I missing anything? I think so, and this is where Rewind could help me a lot.
What about your morning?
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On AI & Content Creators — So many Questions — So Few Answers
Should I care if my content is used to train AI models? How is it different than someone who uses part of my content in a citation to write a linkpost, for example? Is it ok for a portion of my content to be used elsewhere as opposed to the full content? Should I be able to opt out of any AI training, just like we can opt out of search engines when posting content online?
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On Slowing Down AI To Stay in Control
I had a discussion about AI yesterday with my wife. She came back from a two-day conference in Toronto. One of the sessions was about the place of AI in society and how it is time to engage in promoting and organizing some AI regulations.
The more I read and learn about AI capabilities as exposed in tools like ChatGPT, the more I think we will eventually need some regulation. For example, one thing we discussed (and on which we couldn’t agree) is the introduction of a delay in AI training. What I’d like to see is that AI companies are imposed a 2 or 3 years delay for their model training. And why would this be necessary? How would it change the game?
Remember that current training is lagging simply because we lack the processing power to digest all the digital information produced daily. But, eventually, it will come, just like Google replaced Yahoo when index content was initially entered manually by a group of people and then by a community. Sooner or later, ChatGPT or similar tools will digest the web in near real-time. And this is where this is going to be even more scary and could really get out of control.
Imposing delay on models training would help public knowledge and content to settle down and let consensus emerge in any research field, for example. Short-term noise would be reduced. In my opinion, it would be more challenging for ChatGPT to be infected by bad actors who will eventually try to influence results with toxic data.
My wife and I couldn’t agree on the effectiveness of this simple measure. She thinks that it would make ChatGPT useless or less relevant. My take goes the opposite side where, like in real life, things like encyclopedias are still helpful even though they were written and got frozen as soon as they were printed. So there is a need for them, like there is a need for more dynamic knowledge content like Wikipedia.
More than ever, we need to define what makes us unique, how we protect how uniqueness and consider slowing things down a bit, so we can have more time to understand what is going on and where things could go if we let things go without proper framing.
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Thought: read-later services should be called read-never because, for me, most of the time, I rarely come back to read my saved articles.
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Thought: Read-later services or applications are a consequence of too much content availability and a lack of time for consuming that content.
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I wanted to publish my long post about Inoreader this weekend so much, but it’s not ready yet. Tomorrow it’s probably the day. Being patient and knowing when something is not ready is a virtue of the writer.
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Like Anything Else, The World is Hybrid
DHH wrote “In defence of the office”:
I salute Apple, for example, for sticking to their in-person culture now that the pandemic is long gone. They’re making that choice knowing that some, talented portion of their workforce will leave as a consequence, yet have the confidence that others will fill those chairs. Isn’t this what we wanted? The freedom to choose how we’d like to work by picking between a plentitude of companies offering the style of our preference?
We’re better served by diverse choices because of the diversity of people (profile, aspiration, culture, etc.).
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Hot AI Summer (or, my practical uses for AI generators)
This is the sort of empowering interaction I love to experience with these new technologies: I’m not being replaced, I’m getting help, much in the way spellcheck and grammar checks in word processors have been doing for decades.
Interesting parallel here with spell checkers and generative AI. At what point the help we’re getting becomes troubling or questionable? The same goes in real life. Suppose there is something that needs your attention in your house, and a fix is required. Either you know from the get-go what to do and fix it yourself, either you go o YouTube and find a visual guide on how to fix it, or you call someone to your house to fix it for you. What’s wrong with the latter approach?
If there is something that generative AI brings to the table is the inevitable discussion in society of what is the human touch and when is asking for help crosses the lines and what those lines are.
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Wait what? Even millennials don’t like algorithms
I don’t fight the future — we need all the help — but as someone who has made the transition from no technology to some technology to always technology — no matter what I do, there is a tiny bit of me that is still holding on to the analog world.
Om Malik is probably my age. And I feel the same all the time. I know what it was like before the Internet. I prefer chronological over algorithmic timelines. I enjoy human curation. I certainly remember and value the “human touch”.
